Using YouTube’s Creative Suite for Great Storytelling

YouTube’s creative suite offers powerful tools to brands and video advertising companies to re-conceptualize their approach to video.

YouTube’s creative suite includes a set of tools that marketers can use to tell great stories to their audiences on YouTube, test variations of video creatives, and assess the impact that their creatives make.

The following tools are included in the creative suite, viz. – video experiments, video creative analytics, director mix and video ad sequencing.

Testing a creative is not an easy job. It can involve a lot of time and cost. Moreover, it does not always suggest real-world performance. Video experiments tool overcomes these problems. Video experiments tool is a feature in the creative suite that does head to head testing. It works along with the brand lift metric and enables a YouTube advertising agency to evaluate the impact that a creative makes on the key metrics such as consumers’ purchase intent, awareness, etc.

Results can be obtained in just 3 days and without any extra expenditure when cleanly segmented experiments are conducted. The non-working media spend, which is utilized in simulated environments, is transformed by YouTube’s video experiments tool into working media spend. YouTube users only view what they want to view, thus making it a highly trustworthy testing platform for marketers.

Developing reports on creative performance is a cumbersome process. The video creative analytics tool simplifies this process. It provides quantitative creative insights to marketers. By including segmentation in the audience retention reports, it provides insights to marketers on how their creatives are grabbing the attention of distinct audience segments. Marketers can know how many people viewed key moments present within a video such as product shots. This makes marketers understand the effects of different creative elements on the performance a YouTube video campaign. By utilizing these insights, a brand along with its partner video advertising company can develop better future creatives.

Director Mix tool makes it very easy to develop multiple versions of a single base video. It allows swapping out elements in order to customize content for specific audiences. It helps deliver the right version of the video to the right audience. Thus, Director Mix helps brands leverage the power of personalization.

Telling stories to audiences that fetch their attention is really difficult, especially when this has to be done at scale. Video ad sequencing tool allows YouTube marketing companies to make storytelling on YouTube highly effective. With video ad sequencing, a story of a brand or its product is revealed over a series of video ads in a defined order. Telling a brand story in a sequence enables marketers to achieve huge awareness and engagement. Video ad sequencing has been used by movie production houses to give their audiences a story-driven introduction to a new movie.

YouTube’s creative suite enables creation of attention-grabbing and impactful video ads that help drive brand awareness, engagement, and sales.

How to Effectively Reach the Desired Audience on YouTube

When it comes to choosing an online video hosting platform for video advertising, the first choice of marketers is always YouTube. The reasons behind this choice are twofold – the vast audience of YouTube and the varied targeting options that YouTube offers.

Marketers can reach their desired audience on YouTube by using a YouTube ad targeting option known as custom audiences. This option involves the use of web addresses, relevant keywords, and apps.

In order to create custom audiences for YouTube campaigns, or for other campaigns such as display, discovery, etc., marketers need to add specific URLs, product-related keywords and apps. Google Ads will display ads to consumers having these interests or buying intentions against content on YouTube, apps and pages.

Before Google introduced the custom audiences’ option, marketers used to make a choice between custom intent audiences or custom affinity audiences. As custom audiences’ option is now available, making this choice is not required. By taking into account the goals and keywords of a YouTube video campaign, the custom audiences feature understands all the signals in order to make account management efficient. If in case, custom intent audiences or custom affinity audiences have been already created, they will get automatically migrated to the new custom audiences.

By using custom audiences, the work of a YouTube advertising agency becomes easier as this targeting option automatically selects the best audience for a campaign. After considering the bidding strategy and video ad campaign’s goals, the system selects an audience focused on one of these three parameters – performance, consideration, or reach.

For instance, if a car manufacturing company wants to specifically target the audience interested in sport utility vehicles instead of the generic car affinity audience, it can leverage custom audiences. The car manufacturing company can make use of relevant keywords, web addresses and apps in order to build the specific audience. Keywords like sports car can be used, uniform resource locators of websites featuring content about sport utility vehicles can be entered, and apps that a person interested in sport utility vehicles would prefer can be added.

For a video advertising company, setting up custom audiences is quite easy. A custom audience can be set up by going to audience manager under the shared library in a Google Ads account, or from within a campaign. After entering the name for the audience, there are shown two options to select from – people possessing particular interests or buying intentions, and people searching for particular terms. The first option is the default one and requires adding keywords describing people’s interests or products they are researching for purchasing. If the second option is selected, then the terms that people are using to search on YouTube and Google are to be entered.

By leveraging custom audiences’ option, marketers can easily target their desired audience, and boost conversions and sales.

Generating High Impact Through Audience-tailored Video Ads

Audience insights related to interests and intent are extremely valuable to the creative development process. Deeper audience insights lead to highly effective video storytelling.

Research shows that a video creative that leverages deeper audience insights can cast a powerful impact. By making little personalization tweaks according to audience insights, brands and their partner video advertising companies can make a huge difference.

The process of creating tailored video assets for different types of audiences on YouTube requires a lot of resources in terms of cost and time. But this process can be made efficient. For example, instead of creating a distinct campaign idea for each of the audience types, a single core idea for the campaign can be developed, and then, small tweaks to this idea can be made to produce new ideas for different types of audiences. Tweaks that can be made include using different screen characters, specific CTAs, tailored text overlays, etc.

Making small adjustments to a video creative does not need a big increase in production, but leads to creation of videos that are personalized for every type of audience. This personalized approach helps in achieving YouTube video campaign goals effectively and efficiently.

A video creative based on a strong concept can resonate with a broader audience, beyond the targeted niche audience. Thus, it can stimulate interest in non-niche audiences also and drive significant engagement. For example, a video ad agency can target different audiences, viz. – those who are environmentally conscious and those who are sports fans – for its awareness campaign regarding ending hunger by slightly tweaking the video ad according to each audience type.

The people who are environmentally conscious draw their motivation from community. Therefore, for them, a CTA having the text – Join us, can be used as it will encourage them to become a part of the awareness movement. The people who are sports fans draw their motivation from personal pride. Therefore, a CTA posing a challenge such as – donate to keep your country fed, can be used for them. These two versions of the video ad, because of their strong creative concepts, have the potential to resonate across a broader audience, beyond the niche segments.

By acquiring a deep understanding of what interests and stimulates an audience, a video advertising company can create meaningful and highly effective video campaign concepts. It can get novel creative ideas by taking its thinking beyond the demographic data of audiences to signals such as different passions of different audiences. Based on audience insights for different types of audiences, different video creatives can be created for different audience types in order to drive high engagement.

By considering deeper audience insights, brands can move beyond one video ad fits all approach and create highly effective, customized video creatives.

Optimizing Video Advertising Campaigns to Better Achieve Marketing Goals

As consumer behavior tends to change with time and new business challenges keep on appearing, it is important for marketers to adapt their advertising campaigns accordingly.

Most of the time, tweaks to media mix, video creative, or audience targeting strategy, can help marketers adapt to change and increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.

By making sure that video mix is well aligned with the objectives, brands and their partner video advertising companies can improve their return on investment. YouTube offers a fast and effective tool known as video experiments to help marketers in this case. This tool enables them to run a head to head comparison of the performance of different versions of a video creative. It also provides insight to marketers on the performance of different versions of creative when they are run as part of different types of ad formats.

When stay-at-home orders were passed during the early phase of the pandemic, consumer electronics brands saw an increase in demand for their products. Laptop sales witnessed a steep increase. Google Trends showed an increase in search queries for topics like starting a podcast. Consumer electronics brands saw this as a great opportunity to sell at-home products during the lockdown. One of the brands decided to reiterate its dedication to consumer service in a manner which genuinely mirrored its business. It decided to communicate its values and expertise.

To do so, it created a YouTube video campaign that featured its employees assisting customers in resolution of problems and helping them make product buying decisions, while themselves working from their own homes. This brand used video experiments in order to know which ad formats give best results. Although the brand got a positive return on ad spend across different ad formats that it tested, the highest return was achieved from the TrueView for action format, which included CTAs. The brand achieved significant increase in awareness and ad recall.

For successful video campaigns, marketers need to reach the right people. By using the contextual video advertising technology, marketers can show ads that are contextually relevant to the video content the consumers are watching. As a contextually relevant ad resonates with what a viewer is currently interested in, there are high chances of viewer’s engagement with such an ad. Just by clicking a relevant ad, user can directly reach the advertised product’s landing page in order to gain more information about the product and make a purchase. 

Another campaign optimization technique to consider involves making simple adjustments to a video creative. Little tweaks such as using a strong call to action or a text overlay can cast a significantly positive impact on the performance of a video campaign.

From the above, it is quite clear that by finding and using the most effective ad format, using contextual ad targeting, and making tweaks to video creative, marketers can better achieve their goals.

Increasing Efficiency by Using Bulk Management Tools for YouTube Campaigns

To help manage video campaigns and ads in bulk, Google offers various bulk management tools. By using these tools, a video ad agency can more efficiently build, manage, and get reports on its YouTube campaigns in bulk.

Some of the bulk management tools are described here. Hundreds of video campaigns can be built and edited at once with the help of the bulk uploads tool. Thus, marketers do not have to build and edit a single campaign at a time. To use this tool, first of all, one has to download a spreadsheet that has all the elements belonging to the campaigns, ads, or ad groups. After this, the elements can be edited, added or removed in bulk. Once the changes have been made, the updated spreadsheet is again uploaded and the changes are reflected in the account.

The bulk in-line editing tool enables a video advertising company to make large-scale alterations to campaigns, ads, and ad groups. This feature can be accessed by using a drop-down menu known as Edit. The Edit menu is available on the campaigns, ads and ad groups pages. By using this menu, one can make changes to many elements at the same time. Bulk in-line editing tool is a very beneficial tool as it saves a lot of precious time of marketers by allowing them to update at the same time multiple items in a single YouTube video campaign or across many campaigns. By using a menu option known as recent bulk edits, one can look at the edits that have been made recently to the account, i.e., the edits made in the past ninety days.

Automated rules tool helps marketers save time by decreasing the need to check campaigns and make alterations often and manually. By making use of the automated rules, marketers can automate alterations to the account, based on their specified criteria, such as status, bids, etc. For instance, one can schedule ads to get displayed at particular times during a day. Similarly, one can use automated rules to adjust bids in accordance with time, season, etc.

Manager account reporting tool allows running a performance report across all the managed accounts. To use this tool, one has to go to an option present in the manager account with the name Reports. Using this option, different performance reports can be created, downloaded and managed. One can also apply campaign type filter to get relevant data.  

With Google Ads editor tool, video advertising companies can not only create and manage YouTube campaigns, but also make changes to campaign settings. Google Ads scripts tool allows automating actions by making use of the JavaScript code. For example, one can use this tool to pause ad groups.

The use of the above-mentioned tools can help marketers in efficiently managing video campaigns and ads in bulk on YouTube.